Locke & Key will dive into the world of Neil Gaiman's Sandman in the upcoming comic crossover Locke & Key/The Sandman Universe: Hell & Gone. For creators Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, the crossover felt naturally fitted to Locke & Key's storyline.
Since Locke & Key showed a world where magical keys open not just portals in people's minds but unlock different realms, Hill and Rodriguez began wondering what Hell would look like. In 2012, as longtime Sandman fans, both Hill and Rodriguez imagined a world where Gaiman's story included a magical key forged from whispering iron all along.
"We had done a story called 'Open the Moon' where our Locke & Key heroes visit an afterlife. We started talking that we had seen Heaven so what about Hell," Hill told CBR. "One of us said 'What if the key that Lucifer gives Morpheus in 'Seasons of the Mist,' what if that key was made of whispering iron from Locke & Key?' That became the leaping-off concept."
Locke & Key/The Sandman Universe: Hell & Gone will feature Mary Locke descending to Hell to save her brother John's soul. In Hell, Mary finds herself in a netherworld resembling the one envisioned over thirty years ago by Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III. With Sandman being such a major influence on Locke & Key, Hill found incorporating the imagery, characters and concepts of Sandman relatively easy. "It should've been hard," Hill said. "I think it should've been high-pressure but it wasn't; it felt very organic and natural."
Rodríguez added, "And from then on, there was no way to stop, baby. It was too cool not to dive into it headfirst and, also because we wanted to something with this story visiting Hell, we wanted a meaningful idea set in that context so from then on, it started developing very organically."
The co-creator continued, "It felt like the two universes had always been waiting for each other and I think part of it is that when Gabe and I started Locke & Key back in 2007, and first started pitching the concepts around that became the series, our point of reference was Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, Hellblazer and House of Mystery. Really, our creative context for Locke & Key was the British invasion comics of the '90s that made Vertigo. So in that sense, the story already had some of that flavor."
Written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodríguez with colors by Jay Fotos, Locke & Key/The Sandman Universe: Hell & Gone #1 goes on sale April 14 from IDW Publishing and DC Comics.
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